


Me and My Shadows

by macha



Series: Georgia on My Mind [13]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-04
Updated: 2007-04-04
Packaged: 2017-10-18 11:47:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macha/pseuds/macha





	Me and My Shadows

###    
_A03.07.01 Ad Astra Era: in the mirror, truth._   


and the name of the tale is:

  


### me and my shadows

  


_[right after the last one - um, everybody knows where to find it all in order if they need to, right? it's[here](http://www.teaattheford.net/conversation.php?id=2919). the timeline needs some updating on these new bits, but that's where to go to get there too (link from the top). it's possible, also, that all those Dru sequences in the vid (another toplink) may make more sense. just so you know. but then again, it's me, so maybe not.{g} ]_

... And not much wiser.

Okay, maybe a bit.

The time went by in a kind of dream with a few sharp objects in between. Things happened, but they didn't seem to have a lot to do with her. She recognized the screams, some mornings, but they didn't feel ... attached. She wondered what point it was that you counted death as death, instead of fudging it as 'at the point of', and could have asked almost anyone who came along, given the ship she rode in on, but she didn't. It felt like death, though; she kept waking up in the mortuary. They were all busy pretending that wasn't where she was. It was very clean, very cold, very white.

B gave her shit, and one fat buffytear, so she knew they were still good. But it wasn't enough, not for her, not any more, and she didn't know how to fix it. No matter, she was gone. Both gone, some way. Have a nice life. Nothing more to say. And honestly, she wasn't sure that Buffy was ready to have that conversation. She couldn't risk it: there was clearly nobody else who could be Buffy long enough to get them through. At least not yet, and she couldn't wait long enough for that to change. In the waiting room, where you ended up after the morgue, she had a number, and it was already up.

It was Spike who told her about the long making of Dru, one long afternoon, while he was cheating at crazy eights. He might have thought she wouldn't remember. He might have been telling her something else entirely, she'd sworn off trying to find meaning anywhere at all. In his story, he told her what he knew about who Dru might have been when she was human. He described how very carefully she had been broken. The devil was in the details. It was a terrible story, and it had no ending.

Dru had been three different species, she thought idly - human, then demon, then angel: well, technically two, but three in the way she thought of herself. How strong was she, really, to make that kind of a transition twice? She thought maybe that's why they always said not to look into Dru's eyes, in case you fell in. Still, she was called the Seer. Dru herself then was not blind. Maybe the trouble was, she saw way too clear. But to see what she saw, go where she went, what did it cost her? And everyone she touched. In every incarnation. Faith wasn't blind, but she'd been down the alley, and she didn't know how to see and then come back. Dru herself wasn't back, not really. Was that eternity, when every step you took could halve the distance, and yet never quite get you back? She wasn't willing to come back other than human, and somehow she was no longer exactly there.

She thought of telling Spike that time in her own universe had stopped. That this was only the waiting room; she was in transit. It seemed like too much trouble to try to say. Everyone wandered in and out, but nobody ever mentioned that she was out. They were all walking gingerly around the road she was on, giving it a wide berth. Could she do it, talk to B? They never really talked; there were too many hard things in the way. Spike did it, but then he'd always been a kamikaze angel. When it came right down to it, could be she'd rather die than churn it all up again.

On the other hand, she was no angel in the small-a, but hoy, neither was he: palming that card. That much she could see, the dirty bugger. She still had an eight to play, though, and he was gonna been surprised. Well, at least he woulda been surprised, except for the part where he could see all her cards already. She would have slammed it down, except he was playing for both of them. Because she had no feeling yet. Still on the road, stuck in the waiting room.

Playing for both of them, because she couldn't. Was that what he did back then, with Dru? Probably - even though he was evil then. He didn't seem to have changed a whole lot in his transitions. Apparently he was good at living for two, until she could again. Nobody mentioned the alley. Did they think she'd forgotten? Or that it might upset her? Were they giving her space? She could hardly stand it, having them always on tiptoe around her. Did that make her the elephant in the room, or the only one who knew there was an elephant, or what? What might Buffy and Spike have gathered about what happened? How would Willow's reports have read? And what would Dru have said?

But something was changing, even here in her unchanging room. Something had altered. Cause Dru showed up every day, and how weird was that? She never touched her, and she never said a word. But there was no sign that anyone tried to prevent her, so the world must have changed while she wasn't looking. What she did do was read poetry out loud. Victorian poetry, and she had no idea how she even knew that's what it was. It was kinda flowery stuff, with way too many words, and it was almost too old to get. But having poetry read to her at all, that was a first. Why Dru would even imagine that this was a good idea was - well, who knew what she thought. Oddly, it was kinda comforting, like music that she could fall asleep to and wake up to, and feel that something in the world... continued. Even if it wasn't her. Dru, of all people, was an island of calm in a sea of - not-calm. Who would have thunk.

Dawn came to gossip, which was only semi-restful. It was her who slipped in the heroic tale of Spike standing over her sorry remains to make sure Willow didn't get to stick her into the bone machine for a six-month stint of coma in the interest of getting better. She got that Willow's thinking was only practical: what difference would it make if she was out, and spared the pain? But Spike, it seemed, had claimed she needed the pain, in order to survive. Poor B had to rule eventually between them. She would have guessed that Buffy would go with Willow, no question, but she didn't.

Thanks a bunch, she told him one day, trying to make a joke of it. He didn't try to match her tone. He let her break the bones in his hand when the pain came sharp, she could hear the crunch. But on this he only said 'I knew you'd rather die'. Cleverly going right around that already-dead thing. Too much alike, that part was just about right.

Knowing he knew she was onto him, another day she pushed it just that bit further. 'You're keeping me here', she said. Pain and life had all got mixed up together, but she was careful not to make it sound like an accusation. He gave her a look so bleak she knew damn well he knew exactly what she meant. How do you do it?, she said, and he did her the favor of not pretending to misunderstand her. 'Stopped doing everything the hard way', he came back. 'Reckon it's hard enough, without that part. And, I've got Buffy. What've you got?' It was the vamp in him, her theory: still going for the jugular. He was merciless in sparring practice too.

Okay, sometimes she wished he wouldn't keep coming, but it wasn't on. Better to hit him back, deadon, and take the pain. So, she said 'And I don't', and scored. Luck of the draw, he could have said back, and she would have left it there. He just said 'you don't know, what you've got' and walked away. She tried to add it up, and it just didn't. Next day, he came back just the same, with the deck of cards. Like it never happened. Like they weren't playing cards in the morgue already, like old Egyptians.

She needed somebody not all emotional to see it clear. Might have asked Darla, famously unsentimental once you got past that creamy surface. Something told her Darla once came from hunger. What's more, she would have bet on Darla coming out on top, in any alley. And time was certainly something she knew a lot about. But when Darla came, to tell her about a different kind of reckoning, she came in with B, and if that tagteam wasn't a scary thought, she didn't know what was.

They never asked her anything about what happened. They only came to tell her why, and what came of it. Carefully neutral territory, they offered up. And sure enough, what happened had come out of Council business, the parts she slept through. They did say that they got intel, declared an emergency, and Buffy called her in. She didn't answer, so they went after her. But they would have been too late, only for Dru. She must have followed me, she muttered. She's been following you for months, you ninny, Buffy said. You wouldn't come in, and you wouldn't be careful enough, and she took it on without knowing any of this other stuff. Because you were taking too many chances, and she didn't like your odds. You're still here only because of what she did.

She let the still-here question go, and they sat there and filled in all the dots. It all made a kind of sense, but nothing really tracked. She didn't get why everyone on every side, following different trails down their own wormholes, somehow all landed on her parade. Calamity Jane, or Typhoid Mary, take your pick. It's because of who you are, Buffy said. You mean, the scapegoat? Somehow the word, once out, filled up the room. Buffy put her head in her hands. In the silence, she fell asleep, but not for long enough because when she woke up they were both still there. Had she missed much?, she wondered idly, still feeling nothing much besides the usual.

So she expanded on it a little, but once she started in, she couldn't stop. She didn't know what B wanted, she had just gone along. But five hundred years in was time enough to tell. She couldn't do what B wanted her to do, whatever it was, because she wasn't what B seemed to think she was. Council bored the shit out of her because she had nothing to contribute, she had zero in the way of diplomatic and god knows she'd always been the same. She didn't understand why they still said the line ran through her, because not like they were making slayers to that model anymore.

And since they weren't the Slayers Two any more, why did she have to live in B's head and know how she felt and what she thought and when she frigging took every breath, when Buffy was terrified by those slayer dreams which never identified targets you could take out anyway, and came so vividly they hurt like hell, which was just something else they couldn't share, even though they did. Other than patrolling, and taking Buffy's back with Spike in battle, she had no skills, no powers, no prospects, and she was only travelling steerage in the ship of state, and she'd like very much for that to stop, please, so she could get off the boat. So why couldn't Buffy agree to leave it alone?

She thought it was a pretty good line of argument, so she stopped to take a breath, but that got Buffy going. She started with 'I meant because you were so important, dummy' and kept right on going. And the gist of it all was something like, what she needed Faith did have to give. Only she withheld it, shut her out. And she came back with 'you shut me out, B, all the time, you always did and it's still the same'. And it was okay, she understood why, not like she found it easy to live with either, and this way privacy was a luxury one of them got at least. And she knew, the hard way, exactly how hard it was for B, and maybe humans just weren't cut out for the being immortal thing, she certainly wasn't, and anyway the way it was, she couldn't see how she could possibly be much help with let's see oh anything. So they should have just let her go, Dru just hadn't got the memo, and maybe when she died the frigging Slayer line would call another one that could do better by them all, because she was tired, and she felt useless because the job description had changed too much, so it would be better for them all. It was simple, really, B, all she had to do was just let go.

But that was apparently a sore point. Her bad, she should have remembered B's legendary inability to let go of anything at all. B wanted to know why the hell she thought it didn't play just the same from her end. And in the melee - okay the speech, it only felt like they were mixing it up in a cartoon sequence - B showed just how much she could play the little spitfire, and hey, wasn't that supposed to be Faith's best role?

Funny thing, though, before Buffy ran out of rant, she caught herself kind of enjoying the whole thing, which led to that crap thinking thing about how very much they were more alike than they were different. And about the power they both drew on, how it was darker than the power of both sets of youngers. And how she'd noticed that seemed to be behind why B, in calling the twice seven and by the way turfing them out of paradise when she did, fingered Faith and Dana to fight the intergalactic war with her while leaving the Hellmouth youngers to build Eden. And how B still let the shipraised youngers go downworld to live out mortal lives, as soon as they were ready to deal. So she shared that thought, and asked her if it was so, and Buffy didn't kill her or even so much disagree.

On a roll, she asked her what Buffy thought she'd get if Faith died and the line coughed up another Dark in her place? What B thought she'd get if she had to move Dana anytime soon into position as Second Slayer, she knew well enough and couldn't argue, but it might have been the first time she acknowledged it even to herself, which did seem like progress of a sort. But would Buffy get handed a Dark who was like Faith used to be that first year in Sunnydale? Would she get one who didn't share those dreams, and really wouldn't that be better? Not so much, according to the First.

But they couldn't go on casting themselves as two halves of a whole. They couldn't be whole if they weren't both whole in themselves. They couldn't be strong for one another unless they were different. But Buffy's version of the score was that Faith couldn't accept that they were equals, that they'd been equals a long time, that B needed her to be strong and secure in herself. That she wasn't the broken part of Buffy, but had her own gifts and that all of them, the whole ship, and the universe at large, depended on being able to count on these differences, so they could between them cover all the ground and change could come. And that she wasn't intentionally shutting Faith out, not now, not ever since the day Buffy had lost the planet Earth. But Faith just seemed to need those barriers that weren't there, and it was crippling them both, and they both had to learn to live and to dream together. That she knew Faith better than she'd ever known anyone, knew what she was, and thought that Faith was better than her in so many ways, and could do so much she couldn't.

She so wanted B to believe that of her. So it hurt to have to answer her: 'but I'm not you. I come from a different town, a different universe, you don't know how different, it wasn't sunny Sunnydale. Mother and home are just words to me, and the words are loaded with baggage shit you've never imagined. And I had to come so far, to get to here, you don't know B, and you'll never know, and I can't do more, this is all I've got, this is what I am, and I know it's not enough and you have to let me go.' And B said she didn't care where the hell Faith came from, it didn't mean she had to live in the dark, and she had to deal, to learn to live, because Buffy needed her to be okay. And if that meant Faith had to step down, to stop, she could understand it because she'd been there too, more than once, and she'd try to live with Faith's choice, because she loved her and she wanted her life to be bearable. But she couldn't pretend that it didn't matter to her whether Faith survived, because it freaking well did, and it always had, and what she felt wasn't gonna stop being true no matter how hard it was to say or to hear. And that Faith, like Spike, was unique, and they needed her a lot more, maybe, than she needed them, which maybe wasn't fair to lay on her, but which was certainly true, so she couldn't pretend it wasn't. And the dreams scared her too, but they were important, and she wondered if it would maybe help them both to stop pretending those boundaries were there, when they really weren't, because then at least they'd both know they were not alone.

By this time they were both a mess, and maybe especially her, since she couldn't burn off the excess energy still crackling in the room, since only her little pinkies were moving so far and not much even she could do with that to express her feelings. While Buffy had acquired that half-drowned look she always got when her mascara ran, all woebegone and bedraggled, which was a great improvement on Buffy Stoneface all the way round. In fact it felt a bit like Buffy and her were both standing together against all comers, doing their oh yeah, another apocalypse, been there done that, still on the job and ready to wade in schtick. A feeling she hadn't had in a long long time, that she was surprised to find she'd missed a lot. Kinda got her juiced, truth to tell. Which is one way, she guessed, that immortality could actually turn out to be a feature instead of a bug: so you could start to think a bit wider, more longterm instead of just day2day shit. So making a start on that, she guessed that maybe this here little argument didn't amount to a hill of beans when you set it against the chance of both of them coming out of it alive this time and actually on the same page. Couldn't they have had this little talk five hundred years back, though? But no, to be fair, they probably couldn't.

And all this time Darla, the actual expert on immortality issues, had been sitting there looking on with interest, not a hair out of place and she could have sworn she never even blinked. At different points both Willow and Spike had appeared at the door and then beat a hasty retreat after counting heads, and she doubted they'd be keen to rush in later and declare a winner. Darla was, no shit, made of sterner stuff, and Faith suddenly recalled she'd spent quite some time with the Irish a few centuries back and probably had a grip on this kind of upheaval.

And somehow out of it all came some good ideas that might let them live with themselves and with each other, without going evil or giving up the ghost, or even going majorly cranky, though of course that was Buffy's thing (and the neat thing was she didn't have to duck there like she usually would). Darla also offered up some sage advice on the importance of learning how to live with both immortality and twinhood in such a way that you never forgot your name.

And as it turned out, Darla had saved up a whole bunch of stuff in her basket of knitting that she'd been hoping Faith would work on with her. Where Faith wouldn't be so much travelling in the best of circles, so bonus, more like patrolling on the mean streets of Laredo. but without having to always play the sheriff. And there was a bunch of stuff about Faith doing the duty of protection. Since after all Faith was the one, Buffy said, who was good at learning all their names. And that was who they were there for, after all, so it mattered.

She was nine months down, a long long time when you factored in Slayer healing. Pretty close to the count from that time when Buffy killed her, on a world now gone forever, after a different kind of a ride. The usual out in the worlds shit went on in the way it does whether you kept an eye on it or not, but she tried to pay attention more. Politics, Buffy called it all, rolling her eyes, and even before Faith was out of bed B took to calling everyone who didn't live on the ship Faith's constituents, which kinda had a grand sound to it. Sometimes there was still Slayer trauma too, since both of them were still mostly human. But her and Buffy started to share the load.

Somehow the ship began to seem like it maybe wasn't entirely the wrong place for her to be. Georgia couldn't get small enough to visit, but one day Andrew came to show her how the two of them had conspired on a set of plans to build Faith a stronghold of her own within the shadow of Drusilla's Tower, between the gardens and the training grounds. Not too far, she noticed, from Not-Willys bar. And her and Willow between them would be responsible to protecting the kids, who were the last-ditch save-at-all-costs part of the whole shebang in every emergency plan.

Looked pretty cool, she thought, what they had in mind so then Tara came to talk to her about how she might want to do it up. The only time she'd ever had a real place that was her own to keep instead of just temp quarters was way back when with the Mayor, which was strange to even think about. It was gonna be spartan, but comfy, and who knew that nanotech could do all that. It was almost time to leave the Waiting Room, which wasn't inside the morgue at all, come to find out, what with so many things to be done to earn her keep. Faith's Keep, ha ha. She made a stab in her head at calling herself Home, and it didn't sound as wrong as she thought it would, so maybe she'd say it into the air one of these days. But hey, no pressure. Not like there wasn't plenty of time.

The dreams continued. Her and B talked to Dru about them, and learned a lot about what Dru saw herself, and how she lived with what she knew. Even better, she saw their dreams in ways they'd never thought of, and offered up plenty of insight into how to read them too. Buffy saw predictive as the wrong word altogether, as it turned out, and oddly enough so did Dru, who said they were pathways, possibilities, to decide between, and they started to learn how to walk those patterns without falling in. It became a thing, sharing their dreams with each another, which was kinda interesting and seemed to make them lighter to carry; and after a while Dana started coming to those sessions too.

Still laid up, but moving at last she asked Spike one day what he had done, back in the day, when Dru had a bad spell? 'I read her poetry', he said. 'Dunno that she would remember, she was pretty far gone sometimes. Sounds kinda silly, that, but I thought maybe it would give her a voice outside herself, to trust or come to out of the dark, or even just to know someone was there'. She thought about that, and about the way Spike was, when he first thought of that. She remembered Dru coming towards her in the alley, so slowly, it seemed like. Blocking the light, but at the same time halving the distance between them every time she took a step. Towards where she was, lost in the cold dark of that space between.

Everything heals, he'd told her, at the end of his Dru story early on. If there is time. Lately the dolls, he offered, were no longer blind.


End file.
